Frankenstein's Ghost Story: The Last Jacobin
Novel

Michael Scrivener

Genre, 19:3 (Fall 1986), 299-318

{299} Victor Frankenstein attends the university, practices his
scientific lore and creates a monster at Ingolstadt, a place once
identified by virulent anti-Jacobins like the Abbé
Barruel as the city where the Illuminati originated, the
Free Mason conspiracy which caused the French Revolution.1 Scholars have
known about this peculiar allusion for some time, but the
question remains as what to do with this and other allusions which evoke the
revolutionary decade of the 1790s. The novel is dedicated to "William Godwin, Author of Political Justice, Caleb
Williams, &c." The works mentioned are the radically
intransigent ones of the 1790s, not the later, more Romantic
novels like Fleetwood. Walton's letters to his sister are
dated "17--," which can be translated as "179-," because the
novel's characters cite 90s' texts like Volney's Ruins and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, but
most importantly because the novel represents at numerous points
1790s' Europe, not simply dramatic events like the Reign of
Terror (hinted at in the episode of the de Laceys' exile) but
the very cultural milieu of the period, its rhetoric, logic, and
symbolism.

Victor's father, Alphonse Frankenstein, marries the daughter of
his best friend Beaufort, who dies in poverty and despair.
Beaufort had "a proud and unbending disposition, and could not
bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where
he had formerly been distinguished for his rank and
magnificence" (F 27).
John Thelwall published a novel in 1801 entitled The
Daughters of Adoption, using a pseudonym, John Beaufort.
Thelwall, like Godwin, was one of the principal English Jacobins
who enjoyed a brief moment of fame in the '90s until the
political repression and cultural reaction forced him to retreat
from active political life.2 Godwin too employed a pseudonym,
Edward Baldwin, to publish his juvenile library for the same
reason {300} Thelwall did: he had to make his living by writing
and his "name" was too notorious for the book-buying public. I
draw out the Beaufort allusion to make several points. For
Godwin, Thelwall, and their circle the 1790s was
traumatic. As intellectuals who lived by their writing,
the actual political repression was not perhaps as profoundly
disturbing as the cultural reaction which buried them in abuse
by at least 1802, if
not earlier. That this terrible sense of trauma was
communicated to the author of Frankenstein as she was
growing up can be taken for granted without resorting to deeply
psychological speculation.3 By the time her novel was
published, the phrase "novels of the Godwin school" signified
not the Jacobin novel of the '90s but a Romantic novel which
probed the psychological complexities of a deeply disturbed
protagonist, such as Godwin created in Fleetwood (1805) and
Mandeville (1817).4Godwin's daughter would
hardly resurrect the '90s merely in order to negate the
radicalism of her father who had already distanced himself in
print from his most radical views, for which he already had paid
dearly. Rather, for Shelley and a new generation of
intellectuals, the '90s were a provocative source from which
they would articulate through revision their own ideology. At
another level, the novel is a tribute and elegy to the defeated
radicalism of her parents and their friends.5

The initial impetus for the novel was not political; rather, she
wanted to complete a ghost story, prove herself as a writer and,
not incidentally, bring in some needed money to the Shelley
household. Once she began constructing a Gothic narrative, however,
she superimposed on it another "ghost" story, the story of the
revolutionary decade. All that Gothic narrative requires is the
production and eventual elimination of fear in the reader. There
are numerous ways to accomplish this, but usually a narrative
has to have a protagonist with whom the reader can sympathize
and who is mortally threatened by a villain who is either
completely or partially demonic. The completely demonic villain
can be defeated only by magic or physical force or some
combination of the two. Presumably the novel's Preface (written
by Mary's husband)6 refers to this
kind of Gothic when it condescendingly alludes to "mere" tales
of "supernatural terrors" and "a mere tale of spectres or
enchantment" (F 6). A
partially demonic villain is appropriate to the kind of
"serious" Gothic which the novel announces itself as because
such provides the author with a wider range of possibilities in
both creating and eliminating terror. For narrative models in
constructing her novel she turns not to the popular Gothic but
to the narratives of the '90s intellectuals and of the Roman-
{301} tics, including her husband. The type of narrative she
draws upon has no familiar name but I will call it the story of
the errant utilitarian.

Although "utilitarianism" primarily signifies to us the
philosophy of Bentham and Mill, "utility" was of course a key
concept for the Enlightenment intellectuals and radicals of the
'90s and still possessed powerful associations for Shelley's
generation. Utility
signified what was best for humanity's interests. Quite
deservingly the word has been subjected to all kinds of
skeptical analysis, but if one situates it in the context where
it was most meaningful, as the antithesis to "custom,"
"prejudice," "egoism," "privilege," "luxury," "superstition,"
"corruption," and so on, one sees that it was the inevitable
concept by which aristocratic, monarchical and church-dominated
culture would be opposed. Although the second generation of
English intellectuals was critical of the '90s' concept of
utility as defined by Godwin, Paine, Thelwall and
their circle, the second generation (Hazlitt, Hunt, the Shelleys, Byron, Keats, Peacock, et alia) accepted the
philosophical authority of utility in this sense: an
intellectual's duty was to write and speak as someone opposing
established power and promoting the interests of humanity and
not of a sect, party or even nation. Defining what those
interests were was more problematic for the second generation
than for the earlier, but the younger group accepted utilitarian
criteria.7

The narrative of the errant utilitarian was perhaps first
composed by Godwin himself in the most famous Jacobin novel,
Caleb Williams, when he revised the original ending. The
first ending had Caleb in prison slowly going mad, thus
maintaining to the end his status as a victim of aristocratic
prejudice. The new ending has the long suffering victim become
consumed by guilt for having wreaked his revenge on his
oppressor Falkland. Although the new ending does not soften the
relentless critique of injustice, it signals a new direction for
reformist narratives. Wordsworth wrote a number
of works in which the focus is on the education of a utilitarian
whose mistakes are highlighted. In addition to the most famous
of such poems, The Prelude, there are also The
Borderers and "Lines left in a Yew near Esthwaite," which
portrays an otherwise admirable character of exquisite
sensibility who nevertheless sins against utility by being so
self-centered. (Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, cited a
number of times in Frankenstein, is in some respects
similar because the protagonist's "crime" seems far less serious
than the guilt he is made to suffer). Shelley's Alastor portrays
another otherwise exemplary character whose single error leads
to his death. In a broader {302} perspective, one can see how
the problem of utility preoccupied writers like Shelley (whose
unregenerate Prometheus is
an errant utilitarian) and Keats (who was, if also the least
explicitly political of the Romantics, the most intensely
troubled by the problem of poetry's -- and the intellectual's --
utility). The story of the errant utilitarian can turn against
utility itself and become an apostate testament (to an extent,
The Excursion and especially the Biographia
Literaria are apostate stories: as soon as humanity's best
interests are identified more or less with established power,
utility's antithetical and negative purpose is eliminated, so
that utility itself as an operative concept has been
superseded). However, the Hunt circle of intellectuals revised
rather than rejected utility, so that their narratives
simultaneously assume utility's antithetical critique of
established power and the necessity of qualifying
utility. The defensive tone of the errant utilitarian narrative
is obvious, and the reasons for the defensiveness are equally
obvious (the political repression, the cultural reaction, the
failure of the French Revolution to live up to its advocates'
highest ideals, and so on). Nevertheless, to mistake the
narrative of the errant utilitarian with apostate testaments or
anti-Jacobin propaganda is to do extraordinary violence to the
political culture in its historical context. In short, "utility"
survived the '90s but only in the form of a utility whose
demonic deviations from the true interests of humanity were
exorcised.

Each of the three principal narratives comprising
Frankenstein is a story of an errant utilitarian: Walton,
Victor Frankenstein, and the monster. The major turning-points
in the plot are governed by a utilitarian logic: Victor's
decision to tell his story to Walton, to make a mate for the
monster, to destroy the mate (the key episode for the
utilitarian theme), and to berate the mutinous sailors shortly
before he dies; Walton's decision to turn back from his quest;
and the monster's decision to tell his story to Victor
Frankenstein and finally to kill himself. If one examines the
three main narratives for their rhetorical purpose, one sees
Walton's monologue of self-justification, Victor's cautionary
tale to a fellow utilitarian pioneer, and the monster's plea for
utilitarian justice. In addition to this redundant treatment of
utility, the behavior of each narrative's protagonist is
carefully explained by reference to the doctrine of Necessity,
an Enlightenment version of determinism whereby the particulars
of human action can be traced to their "cause." (Again, an
effort by the historical imagination is required to perceive in
this Necessitarianism not simply a crudely mechanistic
psychology, which of {303} course it was, but rather also as the
inevitable cultural construct by which liberal intellectuals of
that period could contest the hegemony of a free will linked to
natural depravity and original sin). So, the novel has three
stories of errant utilitarians in which the crucial
turning-points of the plot are governed by the logic of utility
and in which the characters are written according to the
doctrine of Necessity, an indispensable assumption of
utilitarianism. There is yet another level of redundancy: the numerous parallels, both
structural and thematic, among the three narratives.

This extraordinary repetition of utility at so many levels would
seem to indicate the novel's generic identity as a didactic
fiction in the tradition of the Jacobin novel of the 1790s. I
want to apply to Frankenstein some of the categories
developed by Susan Rubin Suleiman in her recent book,
Authoritarian Fictions. The Ideological Novel as a
Literary Genre. The ideological novel or roman à
thèse is defined thus: "a novel written in the
realistic mode" (hence excluding fictions like Rasselas or Candide) "which
signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent,
seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political,
philosophical, or religious doctrine" (7. italics in
original). Although Frankenstein is in the realistic mode
(despite the supernatural elements), and although its degree of
redundancy does indeed reduce ambiguity in order to "propose a
system of values" (55-56), the novel also equivocates its
didacticism as a typical Jacobin novel of the '90s would not.
Before illustrating how the novel disguises its generic
identity, I want to continue to develop its qualities as a
roman à thèse in Suleiman's terms. The key
elements of the ideological novel are the following: (1) "the
presence of an unambiguous, dualistic system of values"; (2)
"the presence (even if it is only implied, not stated) of a rule
of action addressed to the reader"; (3) "the presence of a
doctrinal intertext" (56). One of the principal ways to develop
the ideological narrative is by putting the protagonist through
positive and negative courses of "apprenticeship" during which
the character learns and unlearns correct and incorrect values
(chapter two). Frankenstein meets all the above
criteria. The primary dualism is between correct and incorrect
utilitarian behavior, but there is another dualism, the one
typically assumed by the '90s Jacobin novel: "prejudice" versus
"virtue," which corresponds to the conflict between established
power and the oppressed. The rule of action addressed to the
reader is clearly stated and implied a number of times, although
the rule of action has two parts: utilitarian over-reaching is
prohibited; and (applied primarily to the {304} monster's
narrative) in Percy Shelley's words, "Treat a person ill, and he
will become wicked."8 There are of course subsidiary
moral injunctions in the novel, but these two are primary and
unambiguous. The doctrinal intertext is ever present, namely,
the '90s doctrines of utility and "universal virtue," especially
as articulated in Godwin's Political Justice, as well
as the narratives of errant utilitarians. The three protagonists
are put through educational apprenticeships whereby the moral
lessons of the novel are illustrated.

Since the novel seems to fit so neatly into the category of
Jacobin novel, why then has it so rarely been interpreted as
such? As I mentioned earlier, the novel disguises its generic
identity in many ways. First, there is the Preface, which except
for one paragraph (the third) would be unexceptional in a
Jacobin novel. The author, according to the Preface, is "by no
means indifferent" to the novel's "moral tendencies" (the double
negative here is peculiarly understated for a didactic novel).
The moral concern is "limited" to avoiding popular novels'
"enervating effects" and exhibiting "the amiableness of domestic
affection, and the excellence of universal virtue." A Jacobin
novelist would not "limit" the novel's moral province, even if
the domain were as large as Shelley has created it. Then there
is the key sentence, the first part of which merely points out
that the protagonist's "opinions" cannot be equated always with
the author's, but the second part would never appear in a
Jacobin novel: "nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the
following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of
whatever kind" (F
7). Although one can read this disclaimer as ironic (that
is, orthodox and established ideas are mere prejudice and cannot
qualify as philosophical), such casuistry is hardly the most
obvious way to interpret this statement, which on the surface
seems to signal the novel as something other than a didactic
narrative. The distinctive feature of the Jacobin novel is
precisely its advocacy of one system of values at the expense of
another. I have indicated -- and will illustrate even more
concretely later -- how relentlessly didactic the novel's
narrative strategies are. That there is a blatant contradiction
is unambiguous, and the problem is to interpret the
contradiction.

That this particular disclaimer or apology in the Preface was
not trivial is quite clear from the earliest reviews of the
novel. For example, the reviewer in La Belle
Assemblée refers to the disclaimer approvingly, if
also somewhat suspiciously, as indicating the author's
disagreement with the novel's many radical ideas. The reviewer,
wishing the novel's "moral" were clearer, nevertheless
identifies it in the following words: "the {305}
presumptive works of man must be frightful, vile, and
horrible, ending only in discomfort and misery to himself" (R, I, 42-43). The
disclaimer did not satisfy all the reviewers, some of whom
disapproved of the novel on moral grounds (Quarterly Review, Edinburgh (Scots)
Review, Gentleman's
Magazine, Monthly Review, British Critic),
arguing that the novel was either immoral or amoral or morally
unclear. Many of the reviewers nevertheless identified in one
way or another the "presumption" moral, which was the way
Shelley's culture read her narrative of the errant utilitarian.
Indeed, the first theatrical adaptation of the novel was
entitled Presumption; or, The
Fate of Frankenstein (1823). Another 1823
presentation was entitled Frankenstein; or The Danger of
Presumption. This and other theatrical adaptations and
burlesques were popular in the London theatres.9

The Preface's disclaimer alone cannot fully account for either
the reviewers' complaints about the novel's "moral" or the
presumption moral by which Shelley's culture actually
interpreted the novel. Rather, if one infers from the reviews
and the theatrical adaptations, one realizes that Jacobin novel
was no longer readable for Shelley's culture, that it existed
only as a ghost whose shadows could be ignored or, if not
ignored, would be interpreted according to the living codes of
the audience. The reading public could not accept an ideological
narrative whose doctrinal center was '90s radical philosophy.
Moreover, the novel announces itself as a Gothic fiction whose
apparently didactic elements matter only in a fairly innocuous
way (one has to notice how "domestic affection" and "universal
virtue" are rhetorically tamer than the anarchic "sensibility"
and anti-establishment "reason" of the '90s.) Since Shelley's
cautionary tales of errant utilitarians were so similar to
another kind of narrative, of the presumptive over-reacher who
is punished, which was moreover rather popular at the time, the
utilitarian doctrines could be ignored and substituted by the
more or less reactionary notion concerning "innovation,"
especially intellectual innovation. One reviewer in fact drew
out the contemporary social significance of the novel's
attractiveness to readers in political terms. The reviewer for
the Edinburgh (Scots) Magazine, speculating on why the
violent events of the novel were so compelling, suggested that
readers, so traumatized by the shocking political events from
the French Revolution to the rise and fall of Napoleon, craved a
similar excitement in their literature (R, II, 819). The appeal
of the novel, then, derived from a public taste for
"presumptuous" Byronic heroes who exceeded normal boundaries but
who {306} ultimately paid a price for their ambition. Naturally,
since the "presumption" moral is not to be found in Shelley's
novel except in the carefully qualified form of errant
utilitarianism, reviewers would complain about the lack of moral
clarity. Gothic narratives depend on a dualistic system of
values which is present in Frankenstein, but not in a way
that would gratify readers' expectations of a clearly defined
"safe" world threatened by a "demonic" world.

The disclaimer, then, was necessary because the reading public
would not accept an ideological novel of the left. It was also
redundant because the novel's status as a Gothic narrative
already disguised its Jacobin identity. Moreover, a narrative
illustrating the errors of utilitarians is obviously similar to
anti-Jacobin narratives, and unless the reader was attentive to
the various cues which declared Frankenstein as operating
within and not outside of utilitarianism, such a reader could
assume anti-Jacobin values were being promoted. The one part of
the novel which was closest to the Jacobin novel, the monster's
narrative, did indeed give readers trouble; as I will show
later, the monster's narrative was an ideological affront to
established opinion. Even if readers were able to sympathize
with the monster's victimization and rebellion, they could not
help noticing that the creature's oppressors were almost
exclusively representatives of the innovating intelligentsia
already discredited -- in their minds at least -- by the
presumption moral.

It is interesting to see how Mary Shelley responded to the
reception of her novel in 1831 when she made considerable
revisions and wrote an introduction. I would not go as far as
some, like Mary Poovey, who claim that
the 1831 edition is a different novel from the 1818 version, but
undeniably Shelley does not explicitly contest the way
her novel was read. Indeed, in one part of the introduction, she
employs the religious rhetoric of "presumption" when describing
the novel's genesis: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing he had put together. . . .
Frightful it must be, for supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism
of the Creator of the world" (F 228). Such rhetoric
clearly assumes the "presumption" moral, yet the novel she
revised contains not a single instance where the 1818 utility
has been replaced by religious orthodoxy. There are some
revisions which erase a few 1818 radical statements (most of
them are minor, not central to the plot),10 but the bulk
of the revisions are stylistic and emphatic, and the monster's
narrative, which caused the most ire in the reviewers, was
revised hardly at all. Whether Shelley was {307} playing games
with the reading public by seeming to be more orthodox than she
actually was, or whether she chose to maintain the novel's
features as they were as a kind of tribute to her earlier
radicalism, or whether her motives were so complex even she did
not know why she did as she did, I cannot guess. At any rate,
she decided, for whatever reasons, to preserve the 1818 novel in
all its essential qualities, including the repetition of
disguising the novel's utilitarianism in an introductory
statement.

The novel itself disguises its utilitarianism in several ways,
one of which I have already alluded to (the rather arcane
symbolism of Ingolstadt and Beaufort, references which evoke the
'90s only for those readers privy to the sophisticated
allusions). In this and other ways, the narrative presents
itself as an historical novel only to blur the various markers
which would establish a definite historical reference; for
example, the dating of Walton's letters has to be
interpreted as 179-. The arrest of Safie's father (on
account of his wealth and religion), the intervention of the de
Laceys, their subsequent arrest and exile, all evoke the Jacobin
Terror, especially as it affected the Girondins, with whom the
English intelligentsia was sympathetic, but no where in the
actual narrative are the political identities of the characters
revealed. The novel's geographical center is republican Geneva, which suggests not
simply Rousseau's
homeland but the Switzerland invaded by revolutionary France --
perhaps the most important event which turned the English
intelligentsia against the French Revolution (not its ideals or
its earlier stages or its actual accomplishments, but France
itself as a political entity, which no longer could be viewed as
fighting a merely defensive war against Reaction). One
particular moment of the '90s represented by the novel seems to
be the point at which the English Jacobins could no longer
support France (even if they still opposed the war against
France and the Pitt repression), and were beginning to lose a
sympathetic reading public, thus necessitating retreat or
silence or retirement or accommodation with established opinion.
Thelwall retired from active political life to a Welsh farm in
1796-97; the Foxite
Whigs retired to their country estates rather than sit in
parliament in the late '90s; the vicious cultural reaction
against "innovating" intellectuals and the "New Philosophy"
peaked in the late '90s, when an avalanche of anti-Jacobin --
and especially anti-Godwinian -- novels, poems, plays, sermons,
burlesques and essays rolled off the press until around 1802,
when the English Jacobins were completely discredited.
Frankenstein repro- {308} duces this emotional climate of
traumatized defeat. Mary Shelley would have been too young to
have known what the late '90s were like, but she surely would
have known second-hand.

The respective narratives of the errant utilitarians trace a
process by which hopeful idealism leads to both despair and
tragic enlightenment. These narratives rewrite the revolutionary
decade in the way typical for the Romantics and the second
generation of left intellectuals: the ideals and principles of
the French Revolution and the English reform movement are
preserved (one could also say redefined), but the errors of the
left are unequivocally criticized. Percy Shelley was almost
obsessed with revising the French Revolution (especially in his
most ambitious works -- The Revolt of Islam,
Prometheus Unbound,
A Defence of
Poetry, and The Triumph of Life), while others in
his and Hunt's circle, if not as intensely concerned with this,
certainly recognized the necessity of this intellectual
enterprise. Given the nature of established opinion which
governed the reading public's expectations, a certain
emphatically defensive posture was necessary on the part of the
left intellectuals of this generation. The "bad" intellectual
had to be exorcised because, according to established opinion,
intellectuals had caused the French Revolution and were
responsible for its most evil consequences.

Frankenstein's exorcism of the bad intellectual operates
primarily by distinguishing between the doctrine of utility,
whose authority is never questioned, and the very fallible
practitioners of the ideal, the utilitarian characters. The bad
intellectual is condemned according to the logic of utility, so
that however badly individual utilitarians behave, utility
itself is protected. Indeed, the novel presents no criteria
other than utilitarian ones by which to formulate positive
values.

Although the novel lacks an authoritative omniscient narrator
who could stabilize the moral ambiguities, each narrator's tale
contains many didactic set-pieces whose redundancy settles
doctrinal questions. A key element in each narrative is the
"education" (or "apprenticeship," to use Suleiman's word) by
which the protagonist comes to know himself. Each protagonist
undergoes an education which is "mixed," that is, neither purely
negative nor positive. The deficiencies in their education,
however, have fatal consequences which are the substance of a
negative education leading to self-knowledge.

Walton suffers from paternal neglect and authoritarianism. His
passionate desire for a "friend" comes not simply from
loneliness but from a perceived lack in his education: as an
autodidact, he never had a paternal {309} authority guide him
wisely through the artifacts of his culture (F 13-14). His father's
only legacy was prohibitive, an injunction not to go to sea (F 11) -- an injunction
especially difficult to obey because the library by which Walton
educated himself was filled with sea-faring literature. Walton
as a character is a particular literary type: the sensitive
young man who defies customary authority and whose ambition is
not for wealth or social position but for humanitarian "glory,"
first as a poet, and finally as an explorer-scientist. Like
Victor Frankenstein, he is of the "innovating" intelligentsia,
that middle-class group attacked so memorably by Burke in the 1790s.

According to Godwin's Political
Justice, an action was properly virtuous -- that is,
utilitarian -- if the motive was correct and if the action's
consequences could be construed as promoting the real interests
of humanity. In the 1818 edition, Walton's motives for his polar
quest do not seem emphatically corrupt, but Shelley remedied
this by adding some lines which establish their improper nature,
especially this sentence which Walton delivers to Victor
Frankenstein: "One man's life or death were but a small price to
pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought
. . ." (F
231-32). Frankenstein labels such sentiments as "madness"
and recognizes in Walton an earlier version of himself; such
recognition motivates Frankenstein to tell his cautionary tale.
(I assume the deficiencies of the 1818 edition were simply the
consequence of Shelley's incompetence and not an alternative
view of Walton's character). When Walton expresses his motives
for the polar quest, the utilitarian justification comes last,
after his desire for a polar paradise ("a region of beauty and
delight" F 9), and
after wanting to "satiate" his "curiosity" (F 10). According to the
logic of utility, Walton's motives are unbalanced, and as
explained by the novel, a consequence of his flawed
education.

The doctrinal statements clarifying utility are numerous, but
one of Frankenstein's is particularly important. He tells Walton
that pursuit of knowledge can be excessive if such ambition
weakens the "affections and destroys simple pleasures." Such
ambition is "unlawful" but the law violated is not religious:
"unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind" (F 51). The presence of
Enlightenment humanism here is obvious. The rhetoric is entirely
within the values of utilitarianism whereby the only criteria
for determining justice are the interests of humanity, "the
human mind." To make even more emphatic the utilitarian basis of
this moral injunction, Frankenstein declares that had {310}
intellectual over-reaching not occurred, "Greece had not been
enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would
have been discovered more gradually: and the empires of Mexico
and Peru had not been destroyed" (F 51). Each cultural
allusion here is a commonplace of Enlightenment thinking,
especially republican political thought, which esteemed Greek
and Roman democracy and was appalled by the plundering of the
Americas.

A dramatic clarification of utility occurs when Frankenstein
decides to destroy the mate he had been constructing for the
monster. After listening to the monster's story, Frankenstein
achieves what seems to be an education in utility because he
accepts responsibility as a creator. The rhetoric used in the
argument between creator and creature, however, alludes
unmistakably to Godwin's Political Justice where
promises, contracts and the doctrine of natural rights are
criticized. When the monster detains Frankenstein on the Alpine
mountain to argue for justice, he says, "'Do your duty towards
me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind'" (F 94). At least up to
this point (prior to the monster's telling his story to
Frankenstein), the rhetoric is entirely Godwinian since "duties"
as opposed to "rights" are recommended in Political
Justice. But after telling his story, the monster uses
another rhetoric. "'You must create a female for me.
. . . I demand it of you as a right which you must
not refuse'" (F 140).
Political Justice criticizes the doctrine of rights
rather extensively, disagreeing explicitly with Paine's notion
of utility. With some reluctance, Frankenstein agrees to a
contract, a promise, an exchange, which he thinks is just to
both the monster and humanity (F 144). When Frankenstein
changes his mind, destroying the female monster, he reasons
accordingly: "[the female monster] might refuse to comply with a
compact made before her creation. . . . Had I a right,
for my own benefit [that is, safety for himself and loved ones],
to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
. . . The wickedness of my promise burst upon me
. . . whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its
own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole
human race" (F 163).
The word "promise" is repeated several times (F 164-65) before the
monster makes his own promise to be with Frankenstein on his
wedding night. The Godwinian argument against promises, contracts and rights was that an
action, to be truly just and utilitarian, had to be so
intrinsically. An action was just or not regardless of the
context a promise, contract or sense of natural right placed on
it.

{311} A pivotal moment in the plot, then, hinges upon an
affirmation of Godwinian utility, for which Frankenstein
sacrifices his best friend, his wife, and future happiness. The
situation is analogous to the
famous case in Political Justice of Fénelon
and the fire; that is, if only one person could be saved in a
fire, should one save a stranger capable of conferring many
benefits to humanity or a beloved family member? Godwin, of
course scandalously asserted that saving the stranger was truly
utilitarian. Toward the end of the novel Frankenstein reaffirms
the validity of his Godwinian commitment: "'In a fit of
enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature, and was
bound towards him. . . . This was my duty; but there
was another still paramount to that. My duties towards my
fellow-creatures had greater claims to my attention, because
they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery'" (F 215). In effect he
sacrifices "domestic affection" and the "simple pleasures" which
define the boundaries of proper knowledge in order to affirm
utility, but there is no real contradiction because utilitarian
actions are not the same as intellectual innovation. The novel
has a number of exemplary utilitarian deeds that entail some
form of self-denial: Caroline Frankenstein's deadly illness
incurred by nursing another back to health; the de Lacey's
helping Safie's father; Walton's master sailor permitting his
fiancée to marry another man; the monster's numerous
attempts to help others. Frankenstein's utilitarian action,
however, is made to seem quite extraordinary because he suffers
so much for it and an easier option was available to him.

After hearing Frankenstein's moral injunctions and cautionary
tale, Walton still wants to learn the "secret" of reanimation
(F 207), still wants
to move toward the northern pole even though "many" lives have
already been lost (F
211). One cannot blame Walton for confusion because his
pedagogue Frankenstein berates Walton's mutinous sailors with
rhetoric that reflects Enlightenment idealism at its most
aggressive moments. The sailors are encouraged to become "'the
benefactors of your species'" and they should be willing to die
"'for honour and the benefit of mankind.'" One sentence in
particular is striking: "'Oh! be men, or be more than men'" (F 212). This rhetoric,
which effectively persuades the sailors to continue at least for
another day, expresses the intransigent commitment to utility
that marked the acme of '90s idealism. Frankenstein's speech may
very well echo, as suggested by James Rieger, that of Dante's Ulysses, thus signifying the
return of overreaching ambition in Frankenstein's character
(F, 212, n. 2). Also, {312} however, it expresses the
most heroic aspects of utilitarian commitment, even though it
certainly contradicts other didactic set-pieces in the novel
which establish rules by which utility can be identified. When
Walton decides to turn back, he does so not because he sees
himself as an over-reacher but because the sailors will not
cooperate (F 213).
Walton's teacher leaves him with these last words:" 'Seek
happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be
only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in
science and discoveries. Yet why do i say this? I have myself
been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed'" (F 215). To the very end
both Walton and Frankenstein are heroic over-reachers, even
though they also acknowledge the cultural authority which judges
such ambition as unlawful. What are we to make of the fact that
two didactic narratives conclude in such a way as to leave both
protagonists more or less unrepentant? It would have been easy
enough for Shelley to have written two unambiguous conversions,
and indeed her audience would have preferred such clarity.

One answer is that the novel, despite criticizing the bad
intellectual, also admires him. Also, however, that neither
Walton nor Frankenstein converts completely to the doctrinal
wisdom of a chastened utility illustrates the relative
inefficacy of didactic narratives to determine behavior. In
fact, almost every didactic gesture in the novel fails to effect
its intended result. Frankenstein's entire narrative which
comprises most of the novel fails to convert Walton or even its
author. The monster's didactic tale to his creator succeeds
initially to persuade Frankenstein to create a female companion
-- until he changes his mind. Safie's father, for whom the de
Laceys sacrificed their welfare, does not become "educated" to
the incorrectness of prejudice; he is as bigoted as his French
persecutors. Elizabeth's eloquence and the spotless "character"
of Justine cannot save the young woman from the court, the
priest, or the Frankenstein family's misperception of her
guilt. The most poignant examples of failed didacticism are
with the monster, who presents himself as a good student to his
instructors, the de Laceys, who repeat upon the monster the
narrative of prejudicial victimization which they themselves
suffered. Meeting young William Frankenstein, the monster hopes
to teach the boy to accept him since his youth would have
preserved him from civilization's prejudice. Frankenstein
himself has available to him so many exemplary actions from
which to learn the correct lessons of utility, but a few
"accidents" are more powerful than the positive education he
received (his father's authoritarian rejection of the alchemists
-- he con- {313} demned them without explaining; Clerval's
father's authoritarian refusal to let his son go to the
university -- Clerval's presence at Ingolstadt would have
prevented Frankenstein's "madness"; the unlucky timing of his
mother's death). The problem is not usually ignorance:
characters know what the utilitarian rules are. Rather, the
rules are difficult to apply in concrete situations and to
become emotionally assimilated. "Prejudice," even among the
utilitarian characters, reigns triumphant in the decisive
crises, thus illustrating the failure of didacticism.

Prejudice's triumph is an explanation and a description of the
1790s from a utilitarian perspective. The monster becomes,
however, by the novel's end, the exemplary utilitarian neither
Frankenstein nor Walton could ever become. One cannot, however,
point to a didacticism that has completely succeeded because
after so purely embodying utilitarian doctrine, the monster
culminates his education by killing himself. The monster's
education as it is portrayed in his narrative is the novel's
most explicitly Jacobin feature whose strategical location
within Frankenstein's narrative makes it quite literally the
"heart" of the novel: there are roughly the same number of pages
before the monster's narrative as there are after. Before
reading the monster's own words, the reader has already
developed a notion of the monster as a hideous, violent
creature, in short, the classical Gothic villain which arouses
fear that must -- according to the logic of the genre -- be
eliminated. The monster's narrative, however, undermines the
reader's fear by representing the process by which a well
meaning, innocent creature is turned into a monster. As the
reader gets deeper into the novel, the generic markers shift
from Gothic romance to Jacobin protest fiction and then back to
Gothic, more or less. The way in which generic
expectations shift can be viewed as a strategy to manipulate the
reader: the least ideologically offensive genre entices the
reader into the novel which shifts generic ground midway where
the most ideologically offensive discourse is located, but in
order not to alienate the reader the novel seemingly
shifts generic ground again back to the Gothic, although by this
time the Gothic has been so redefined that it merges in many
ways with the Jacobin. The structure of the generic shifts also
can work in another way: the reader severely annoyed by the
monster's narrative can read it as an unfortunate interlude in
an otherwise entertaining novel, so that what for one kind of
reader would be the "heart" of the novel would be, for another,
a dead space within which obsolete Jacobin doctrines are buried.
That the monster's narrative was read in both ways at the time
can be documented: Percy Shelley's {314} unpublished review of the
novel places the narrative at the heart of the novel whose
principal "moral" he reads as unjust mistreatment of an innocent
victim who has been transformed into a "criminal"; the
reviewers, however, in the contemporary journals and magazines
objected especially to the monster's narrative on usually
ideological grounds.

Precisely because the monster was a recognizable literary type
-- the rebellious social victim so beloved in Jacobin reformist
narratives -- most of the contemporary reviewers had little
sympathy for him. Walter
Scott's review of the novel in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine, by far the most intelligent, balanced,
disinterested, and responsive to the fiction's aesthetic
features of all the reviews, could not refrain from sneering at
the wildly improbable and excessively detailed education of the
monster "in a pig-stye" (R, I, 77). For
La Belle Assemblée, the monster's education was
"prolix and unnatural" and was one of the few aspects of the
novel the reviewer objected to (R, I, 43).
John W. Croker made snobbish comments on the same thing,
expressing doubts that a "savage" could be educated by the books
within a "Swabian hut" (R, II 765).
The reviewer in The British Critic characterized the
books by which the monster was educated (Paradise Lost, Plutarch's
Lives, Goethe's Werther, Volney's Ruins) in the
following ideological terms: "poetical theology, pagan
biography, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical
Jacobinism" (436).
Scott too recognized the ideological pointedness of the
monster's education (R, I, 77). Modern source studies of
Frankenstein by Goldberg and Pollin indicate that in
especially the monster's narrative, a discourse that is
recognizably Enlightenment, revolutionary and reformist takes
control (Goldberg 27-38; Pollin 97-108). The reviewers' lack of sympathy
for the monster, then, is ideologically overdetermined. It is
not surprising, then, that in the 1823 theatrical adaptation of
the novel, the monster never speaks a single line. Although the
actor was apparently able to elicit some audience sympathy for
the monster, rendering him silent was a way to insure that the
sympathy would not interfere with the presumption spectacle.
The Edinburgh (Scots) Magazinereview showed a degree of
sympathy for the monster, and an 1824 article on the Shelleys in
Knight's Quarterly Magazine expressed even more; but even
in the latter instance, the monster's education was criticized
(R, II, 449). Only if the monster could be read as a
blameless victim who evoked no politically radical associations
was it possible for the novel's earliest readers to sympathize
with his tragedy.

The literature by which the monster achieved self-consciousness
was {315} provocative in a left-wing direction, as I already
mentioned. Although Paradise
Lost was one of the most popular poems in England,
possessed even by many of the poor, the monster's interpretation
of Milton's poem was the
unorthodox "satanic" reading. Plutarch's "pagan biography"
would evoke the republican classicism of both the French
Revolution and the Commonwealthman traditions. Werther's "adulterous
sentimentality" (which readers also associated with Rousseau's Nouvelle
Héloise) represented a dangerous cultural tendency
associated with revolutionary excesses in France and subversion
in England. Volney'sRuins, the monster's
first book, was very popular among English radical booksellers,
a text as subversive in the public mind as Paine's The Rights
of Man. The texts themselves were bad enough, but the
implications of the monster's education were perhaps more
offensive to established views. His education followed a pattern
already defined by Lockeans
and French materialists, whose sensationalism traced all ideas
back to sense experiences. Complementing the Lockean
epistemology was the notion of spontaneous benevolence or "moral
sense" that posited an instinctive social morality. Godwin
himself, though a Lockean and Necessitarian, repudiated the
utilitarian "self-love" school and adopted the assumptions of "moral sense" philosophy to
strengthen his case for human perfectibility. Thus, as the
monster acquired ideas through the senses and exhibited
spontaneous benevolence, he was enacting the Godwinian synthesis
of empiricism and "sensibility," both of which were subversive
of established assumptions concerning human development.

The cultural aspects of education were at least as powerful as
the philosophical. A passionately debated problem for the
privileged classes was whether or how to educate the laboring,
disenfranchised majority. The growth of a plebeian reading
public after the French Revolution terrified conservatives. The
immense popularity of first Paine and then Cobbett confirmed
their worst fears. Despite severe government repression,
"subversive" literature was gaining ground among the "lower
orders." Partially in response to this, the government voted in
the year Frankenstein was published one million pounds
for church-building (Ward 389). In some ways, the monster's
narrative was an educational nightmare: coming from a silent,
animal ignorance, the creature happened to read subversive
literature which he interpreted in a radical manner (F 114-16) and which he
used to validate his violent rebellion against a social order
which excluded him. Had the monster remained ignorant, he might
not have been as destructive, and surely he would not {316} have
been as clever. That precisely this kind of nightmare was evoked
in the culture -- accounting for the reviewers' dislike of the
monster's education -- is indicated by how the monster became
part of English political iconography. As Lee Sterrenburg demonstrates, in
1832, 1867, and the Fenian riot period, Frankenstein was
depicted in political cartoons as an idealistic, self-deluded
reformer whose liberal notions gave birth to a violently
destructive monster representing the revolutionary crowd.
Empower the poor and disenfranchised with knowledge and the
ballot -- so feared the conservatives -- and the results would
be revolutionary violence.

The monster, however, is not simply a rebellious social victim
or a Gothic villain spawned by a reforming intelligentsia; he is
also a representation of that intelligentsia, particularly the
innovating intellectual who is not permitted to employ his
educated powers to reform society. After he understands Volney's
radical social critique, he realizes that without aristocratic
blood or wealth, even if he were not "'hideously deformed and
loathesome,'" his best prospects would have been "'as a
vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste [my] powers for the profit
of the chosen few'" (F
115-16). The monster himself challenges established social
views more fundamentally than either Walton or Frankenstein, and
he initially at least employs the methods most esteemed by
reformist fiction to become a useful reformer of society:
benevolent deeds and "reason." In the monster's failure to
remove the prejudice against himself, he reproduces the failure
of the English Jacobins. To the reading public, the Jacobin
intellectuals were monsters permitted back into the culture only
if they disguised themselves as something else: Thelwall became
an expert in "elocution" and speech therapy (an interesting
career change for a radical orator), while Godwin produced
Romantic novels and educational books, but withheld from
publication his most heretical writings on religion. By the
novel's end the monster uses his "powers" to forgive his
tormentors, to understand the Necessitarian process by which he
became a criminal, and condemn himself ultimately on utilitarian
grounds, so that he affirms the doctrine which give him birth,
which betrayed him, which he tried to actualize, and by whose
logic he must destroy himself. Although Percy Shelley, relying
on the generic logic of Jacobin fiction, read the monster's
monstrosity as a creation by social prejudice, another
possibility suggests itself, not as a better interpretation, but
as a supplement: the monster was so monstrous, so deserving of
extinction, precisely because he was such a {317} pure
embodiment of utilitarian doctrine. Whether the reader judges
established opinion (the reviewers) or the New Philosophy (Percy
Shelley) as the most morally desirable hardly matters in this
instance because in either case the gap between the values
affirmed by the monster and those governing society is so huge,
so monstrous, so disproportionate, that no happy compromise is
possible. Violence is inevitable, one way or another.

Notes

1. In the late 1790s, Barruel's was one of
several anti-Jacobin tracts which identified an intellectual
conspiracy throughout Europe designed to overthrow established
institutions. The liberal Monthly Magazine, 26 (1797),
503, for example, felt these books were important enough to
attack in their review of Barruel and Professor Robison's
Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religious Governments
of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons,
Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Barruel and Robison are
criticized in other Monthly Magazine articles (49 [1799],
589-90; 597). Another text from the Barruel-Robison school was
unfavorably noted in the Monthly Magazine, 54 (1800),
1032: The Rise, Progress, and Consequences Of the new
Opinions and Principles lately introduced into France.
However preposterous, these conspiratorial exposes had
considerable credibility at the time.

2. Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794 along
with Godwin's best friend Thomas Holcroft, was a disciple of
Godwin until they quarreled over political activism in 1795.
Richard Phillips, who published Thelwall's novel, also published
several of Godwin's works. That Godwin and his circle would know
"Beaufort" 's identity can be taken for granted.

3. Sterrenburg, pp.
143-71, explores the novel's treatment of the 1790s and the
anti-Jacobin cultural reaction. See Allen, 225-43.

4. The reviewer of Frankenstein for La
Belle Assemblée, remarking on the novel's dedication to Godwin, observed
that he had retracted his most radical beliefs (The Romantics
Reviewed, I,
44). Subsequent references to Romantics Reviewed
will be abbreviated by R. For characterizations of the
"Godwin school" of novels, see the reviews of Godwin's
Mandeville, R, I, 244-50; II, 757.

5. For an excellent appreciation of the Jacobin
culture and the anti-Jacobin cultural reaction, see the work of
Butler, especially Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.
Romantics. Rebels, and Reactionaries and her introduction
and notes to Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution
Controversy. For the Jacobin novel as such, see Kelly, and
Williams, pp. 74-77.

6. Although much has been made of Percy's
writing the Preface, I am not convinced that husband and wife,
at least in this particular instance, were at odds with each
other. For a view contrary to mine, see Small.

7. To develop the utilitarianism of the second
generation of Romantic writers would require more documentation
and argument that I can provide here, but one example will
indicate the kind of proof I would offer. When Percy Shelley
disputed Peacock's obviously utilitarian critique of poetry
(The Four Ages of Poetry), his defense of poetry
redefines rather than abandons the concept. "Let us examine
. . . what is here meant by Utility," Shelley asks in
A Defence of Poetry, as he develops "imagination" as a
counter to a narrowly conceived notion of utility. (Shelley's
Poetry and Prose, p. 500.)

{318} 8. Shelley's statement appears in an
unpublished review of the novel The Complete Works of Percy
B. Shelley, VI,
264.

9. The theatrical history of Frankenstein
is in Nitchie, pp. 218-31; Glut, pp. 28 and Lyles, pp.
219-23.